(Phys.org) —A team of biologists from the U.K., Germany, and Canada has adapted a theory that suggests that microbes cause food to spoil so that larger animals won't eat it. In their paper published in ...

Microbes collected across the country will soon blast into orbit for research and a microgravity growth competition on the International Space Station (ISS). This citizen science research, known as Project ...

Perched high on the bluffs of the big river valleys in the Midwest are some of the last remnants of never-farmed prairie grasslands. These patches, edged by forest, are slowly being taken over by shrubs. ...

For soil microbiology, it is the best of times. While no one has undertaken an accurate census, a spoonful of soil holds hundreds of billions of microbial cells, encompassing thousands of species. "It's one ...

A team of Harvard researchers showed that the commonly found bacterium Rhodopseudomonas palustris can use natural conductivity to pull electrons from minerals located remotely in soil and sediment while remaining at the su ...

The Sun was once thought to provide energy for all life on Earth - meaning that life could not survive without it. In the 20th century, as astrobiologists began to explore the Earth's most remote and harsh ...

In a surprising new finding, researchers have discovered that bacterial movement is impeded in flowing water, enhancing the likelihood that the microbes will attach to surfaces. The new work could have implications ...

In the current issue of the Journal of the International Society for Microbial Ecology (ISME Journal, 20.1.2014) scientists from the University of Oldenburg and from the GFZ German Centre for Geosciences show that in deep, ...

You might not think of microbes when you consider biodiversity, but it turns out that even a moderate loss of less than 5% of soil microbes may compromise some key ecosystem functions and could lead to lower degradation of ...

As scientists forecast the impacts of climate change, one missing piece of the puzzle is what will happen to the carbon in the soil and the microbes that control the fate of this carbon as the planet warms.

The idea that people make calculated decisions that allow them to obtain the most goods with the smallest amount of effort—a complex hypothesis called 'economic man' for short—often has been challenged. ...

Caught in the act! Researchers from the University of Bristol have observed mating for the first time in the microbes responsible for African sleeping sickness. This tropical disease is caused by trypanosomes, single-celled ...

Scientists and engineers using advanced technology and a unique robotic vehicle to study the deep sea will also be using their computers to interact with students, teachers, and the public about the research ...

Halomonas are a hardy breed of bacteria. They can withstand heat, high salinity, low oxygen, utter darkness and pressures that would kill most other organisms. These traits enable these microbes to eke ou ...